Chapter 94

Aria's POV

The cumulative displacement framework took shape through the summer in the way the best collaborative work did — not in a single sustained effort but in accretion, each contribution building on the previous, the document growing denser and more precise with each exchange.

Gorvan sent his data in two batches. The first was raw — decades of records from confederation schools, anonymized but detailed, covering hundreds of students across thirty years of observation. The second batch was his analysis, which was careful and honest about its own limitations in the way his writing always was. He'd noted where the data was thin, where his conclusions were...